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Sparkle (1)
What happens when the bully is a girl and the target is a boy? What if the bully, in pursuit of her crush on a boy, is a relentless harasser -- a girl who won’t take no for an answer? She doesn’t mean to be a bully. And no one views her this way, not even the boy. No one sees her as the bully she that is, except me, the boy’s mother, of course.
Already tricky waters, bullying often defies easy answers and cookie-cutter responses. And when you add a twisted gender-romance component, the complications multiply.
Here is our story.
My seventh grade son, Alfred, has garnered the attention of Sally, a girl in his class. (Their real names are neither Alfred nor Sally. They have been changed to protect the innocent. Though, in this story, everyone is innocent and not so innocent at the same time.)
At first, Sally just looked like a girl with a crush. But Alfred did not know nor was he interested in dating Sally. (Yes, these children are 12). Sally was initially aggressive with her attention, but her actions were primarily the makings of a crush -- talking to and texting mutual friends about Alfred, and interjecting herself into his classroom conversations. But once Alfred expressed that he did not share her affections, Sally soon became mean, publicly critical and relentless with her attention. Alfred is very social and quite outspoken. He says he tried to ignore Sally. He says he tried to make light of Sally’s comments. Eventually, Alfred repeated more forcefully his lack of interest, and he did so in ways that hurt her feelings (as in, saying “I don’t even know you. Leave me alone!” in a fully populated classroom). But Sally kept coming. And then she began to get physical: pushing Alfred, throwing objects at him, sitting on him in phys ed. It was time for Alfred to get help.
He came home and shared his troubles with his three older sisters—his counsel of women. They came to me in a panic.
“You need to help Alfred, Mom."
“We know girls like this,” my oldest daughter said. “If you don’t talk to someone at school, this is not going to end well!”
And so, obedient to the counsel, I met with the seventh grade administrator. To my dismay, the administrator confided that he did not know what to do about the situation. He’d known about Sally’s behavior. A teacher had reported it. And he said that he’d never experienced a girl who continued to pursue contact with a boy who made his disinterest so crystal clear. And then the administrator said something really scary: “I wish he’d just go out with her and have it done with!”
When I told the administrator that this was a case of bullying, he seemed surprised and noticeably uncomfortable. This characterization had not occurred to him. Alfred had no black eyes. There was no trail of threats or Internet humiliations. Alfred is a football player, after all. He can hold his own.Dan Olweus, creator of the Olweus Bullying Prevention Program, says in his book, Bullying at School: What We Know and What We Can Do:
A person is bullied when he or she is exposed, repeatedly and over time, to negative actions on the part of one or more other persons, and he or she has difficulty defending himself or herself.
According to Olweus, this definition includes three important components:
- Aggressive behavior that involves unwanted, negative actions;
- A pattern of behavior repeated over time and
- An imbalance of power or strength.
The reason no one thought of Sally’s behavior in the same way as they would any other kind of bully, I strongly suspect, is because she is a girl and Alfred is a boy. The kind of behavior exhibited by Sally would never be tolerated if the roles were switched. We are all programmed to see girls as victims and boys as aggressors. So if Alfred is chided enough to respond by word or action against Sally, he runs the risk of very quickly shifting from target to aggressor in the view of others. At that point, in protection of the “weaker sex,” the school’s zero-tolerance bullying policies would instead come crashing down on him.
Both children, bully and target, are likely well aware of this gender dynamic, which makes the ongoing situation more tricky and potentially harmful to Alfred. Herein lies the imbalance of power between them, and why recognizing Sally as a
